I am conducting research on capitalist exploitation of workers in the education industry. If you work in any job role in education, please consider answering some, or all, of the questions in this survey series.
A research project to gather data on capitalist exploitation of workers in the education industry
Introduction
Dear reader,
I am conducting research on capitalist exploitation of workers in the education industry. If you work in any job role in education, please consider answering some, or all, of the questions in this survey series. You can find all the surveys linked right below this introduction. The questions are divided into various categories. Some of these are for the different types of workers in the industry. Many of them will overlap, however. For example, the question about grants and funding posed about schools could easily be applied to libraries and museums.
These questions are adapted and tailored specifically for workers in education from Karl Marx’s pamphlet “A Workers’ Inquiry”, first published in La Revue socialiste, April 20, 1880; Transcribed for marxists.org by Curtis Price, 1997. The Angry Education Workers community used these adapted questions in our zine "An Education Workers' Self-Inquiry". These questions are also meant to help you carry out your own self-inquiry. I encourage you share these surveys, and to use these questions in your own physical workplace with trusted coworkers committed to building collective power in the form of unions. Please feel free to download a PDF of the AEW community's zine from our website that you can print a physical copy of.
You don’t have to answer all the questions. Or answer them at the same time, since this form is set so you can edit your responses at any time in the future. Please answer in as much or as little detail as your time and capacity permits.
Survey links
Responses to the surveys will remain anonymous and undisclosed unless you give me explicit permission to do so. If you are okay with me contacting you to ask if I can quote certain parts of your responses, please make sure to leave your preferred method of contact. There is a space to do so in the first question of each survey link.
Building power with your coworkers is no walk in the park. It’s more like being in a secret, underground organization. Whether your goal is to build a formal workplace union or not, the bosses don’t respond kindly to any collective resistance by workers. Before you can think of going on the offensive against your shitty boss, you (and your coworkers) need to understand how they exploit you. That means asking and answering substantive questions about your workplace—we recommend keeping a notebook where you can keep track of all this. Don’t let it fall into the wrong hands.
One of the most important sets of information to obtain sounds much simpler than it actually is: finding out who works with you. Capitalism brings together huge numbers of people from all backgrounds to work together to generate profits for the bosses and politicians. Fifteen million people work in the education industry, for example. Only healthcare makes up a larger share of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
But that doesn’t mean your bosses want you to cooperate outside their direct supervision. Most of the time, your bosses can’t actually maintain this level of active surveillance. They’re too fond of their offices. That’s why they’re so careful to keep tight control over information about the workplace within those offices. We’re separated and divided by department, job role, education level, shift, job site, and status. And we can’t check our racial, religious, gender, political, or cultural differences at the door, either. Our bosses rely on that.
The corporate and small business owners tremble before the dangers which an impartial and systematic investigation by and for education workers might represent. Knowledge generated by and for ourselves gives us tangible ways to formulate concrete next steps for building solidarity between you and your coworkers of all backgrounds. This is how we can change the balance of power in our workplaces. Let us subject our workplaces and local economies to a ruthless criticism. That means understanding the negative impacts of our institutions alongside the positive contributions they make. First, we must build relationships with our coworkers and study our jobs through a scientific lens.
We must attempt to initiate an inquiry of this kind with those poor resources which are at our disposal. We hope to meet in this work with the support of all fellow workers: urban and rural; manual and intellectual. It is us alone who can describe with full knowledge the misfortunes we suffer. Only we—not experts like education researchers, academics, and journalists, or bureaucrats from government agencies—can begin to heal the social ills which we and our communities are prey to. We also rely upon ideological socialists of all schools who, being wishful for social revolution, must wish for an exact and positive knowledge of the conditions in which the working class—the class to whom the future belongs—works and moves. Margaret Haley eloquently summarized why in her 1904 speech to the National Education Association convention titled “Why Teachers Should Organize”:
Two ideals are struggling for supremacy in American life today: one is the industrial ideal dominating through the supremacy of commercialism, which subordinates the worker to the product and the machine; the other, the ideal of democracy, the ideal of the educators, which places humanity above all machines, and demands that all activity shall be the expression of life. If this ideal of the educators cannot be carried over into the industrial field then the ideal of industrialism will be carried over into the school. Those two ideals can no more continue to exist in American life than our nation could have continued half slave and half free. If the school cannot bring joy to the work of the world, the joy must go out of its own life, and work in the school, as in the industrial field, will become drudgery..
It will be well indeed if the teachers have the courage of their convictions and face all that the labor unions have faced with the same courage and perseverance.
Our self-knowledge and understanding builds solidarity and demystifies the ways our enemies, the bosses, exploit our labor and steal our time. By doing so, we take the forms of organization imposed on us by our bosses and start to build our own structures in the workplace. I also encourage you to share the information you and your coworkers discover with an organizer; the Industrial Workers of the World union offers trainings and external organizers who can help your campaign. Only by communicating across job sites, companies, districts, and borders can we come to a true accounting of the common struggles, demands, and dreams we share as a class of workers in the education industry.
If you're interested in participating in dialogue with other revolutionary educators and organizers, join our small but growing community's discord server:
